KOLKATA: India’s first private limited company dealing with
cryonics has come up at a three-bedroom flat on James Long Sarani in Joka, a few kilometres from the house of Subhabrata Majumdar, who had preserved his mother’s body in a freezer for three years. Cryonics is the technique of freezing bodies for years in the hope that future science will be able to bring them back to life.
The Kolkata-based company,
Cryonics Research Institute Private Limited, was registered with the Registrar of Companies, Kolkata, on March 15, just three weeks before Subhabrata’s mother Bina’s body was recovered from their S N Chatterjee Road home.
Parag Chatterjee, 43, one of the three directors and the brains beh-ind the company, is an alumnus of Bengal Engineering College (now IIEST), and the head of the department of computer science and engineering at a well-known tech college near the city.
Globally, there are four major players in cryonics: Alcor, Cryonics Institute and American Cryonics Society based in the US, and KrioRus in Russia. Alcor and Cryonics Institute have around 300 bodies cryopreserved — at -196 °C in containers of liquid nitrogen — and a couple of thousand people registered with them, whose bodies will be preserved once they are “legally dead”.
Subhabrata claimed he had tried to preserve his mother’s body using the technique. He, however, could not afford to do it professionally. “Subhabrata filled the body with different chemicals. He also removed some body parts. A similar procedure is sometimes followed at some cryonics facilities. It looks like he was knowledgeable, but the process is too expensive for an individual,” said Avinash K Singh, the founder and president of India Future Society (IFS), the most vocal advocate of cryonics in India.
But even Singh was not aware of the Cryonics Research Institute till TOI contacted him. “It seems pretty new. I am curious to know about it. Till now, there had been no cryonics facility in India though some research work has been done by organisations like the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. We would like such facilities in India, but given government rules and regulations and lack of financial support, progress has been slow. IFS had earlier tried to collaborate with KrioRus, but nothing materialised. Maybe, something will come up in future,” said Singh.
Chatterjee, however, has taken the plunge. With his father Pijush Kanti Chatterjee, a retired central government employee, and
Saibal Mazumder, a schoolteacher in Amtala, South 24 Parganas, he got his company registered with a paid-up capital of Rs 1 lakh and an authorised capital of Rs 10 lakh. “The project will cost us Rs 12-14 crore. We have written to different organisations across the world, applying for grants. Some of them have sent expressions of interest. We are hoping to get some funds and start work this year itself. We will write for funds to the government of West Bengal too, though we will have to set up our facility outside the state,” he says. “It is a long-term project. We will have to be prepared to preserve the body for 50 years, maybe even 100 or 200 years. We cannot set up our facility at a place which might go under water because of sea-level rise, or in a seismically active area. At the moment, we are looking at places like Agra or Gwalior.”
Expert doctors and biotechnologists are being roped in for the project, said Chatterjee, adding, “a senior professor from Japan will be on our advisory board.”
What about the legal issues? “We are not doing anything illegal. We have written to the central government through the Medical Council of India and are awaiting a positive response.” Regarding Majumdar’s bid to preserve his mother’s body, Chatterjee said: “He lacked information awareness. Finally, when he acquired the information, it was too late. With progress in the field of nanotechnology, it will be possible to bring the dead back to life in another 50 to 100 years. Our job is to preserve the bodies of those willing till then.”
